A staffer at Minnesota Public Radio has about as tired and lazy a take on the Santana trade talks as you will ever find:
The Big Market Teams (BMT) are low-balling the Twins with offers that won’t include another star player (like Jose Reyes or Robinson Cano) or two-top shelf prospects (like Jacoby Ellsbury and Jon Lester). This is a travesty.
The travesty is that my tax dollars are going to fund an outlet where a man who apparently failed out of his high school economics class on day one gets to speak his empty mind.
The team that acquires Santana gets ONE YEAR of his services, plus the value of an exclusive negotiating window, blunted somewhat by the fact that the acquiring team would then have to extend Santana for 2009 and beyond before seeing what he does in 2008. This writer wants another team to give up, say, four years of Jose Reyes signed to below-market salaries PLUS something else for that one year of Santana. It is conceivable that there would be a GM stupid enough to make that trade, but the fact that no one is willing to make that trade is not a travesty; it is common sense.
The writer in question, David Zingler, says that this situation demonstrates “exactly what’s Wrong with Baseball.” I think his article shows exactly what’s Wrong with Public Radio. Despite a simple economic argument that trading Reyes for Santana would be a terrible deal for the Mets, and despite mountains of evidence that there’s nothing substantially wrong with baseball, Zingler plows right on ahead with his argument, because he’s a Twins fan and he’s angry. He can be angry if he wants to be, even if his reasoning is fault, but it would be nice if he wasn’t doing it while on the dole.
UPDATE: Great minds, etc., etc.